Global Environmental History of
the Twentieth Century (HIST 27)
– Amherst College, Fall 2010 –
Bao Steel Factory #2, Shanghai (Photo: Edward Burtynsky, 2005)
Instructor: Edward “Ted” Melillo
Office Hours (Morgan Hall-112): Tuesdays from 12:30 PM-2:00 PM & Wednesdays
from 10:00 AM-12:00 PM
Office Phone: (413) 542-5415
E-mail: emelillo@amherst.edu
Course Description: This course examines the environmental history of the world since
1900 with a particular focus on Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and China. We will
use books, articles, films, and a range of online media to illuminate the comparative and
interdisciplinary possibilities of global environmental history. In addition to studying
the past, we will explore how to use historical knowledge in the formulation of policy
recommendations and grassroots initiatives for addressing contemporary
environmental issues.
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Format: Our class will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10:00-11:20 a.m. in
Webster 220. Class attendance is mandatory; class participation comprises 20% of your
final grade.
Required Texts (available at Food for Thought Books in Amherst):
1. Oscar Olivera, in collaboration with Tom Lewis, ¡Cochabamba!: Water War in
Bolivia (Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2004)
2. Tamara Giles-Vernick, Cutting the Vines of the Past: Environmental Histories of the
Central African Rain Forest (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2002)
3. R. Edward Grumbine, Where the Dragon Meets the Angry River: Nature and Power
in the People’s Republic of China (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2010)
4. Ramachandra Guha, How Much Should a Person Consume? Environmentalism in
India and the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)
Unless I hand them out in class, all other readings will be available online through
E-Reserve.
Assignments:
1) Three short papers: During the second week of the semester, I will provide you with
a list of essay topics for the three short papers that you will write this semester.
Each of these topic questions will ask you to use your knowledge of
environmental history to formulate a policy recommendation or design a
grassroots initiative to help solve a contemporary problem. For each of the
essays, you will have three options from which to choose. Your essays should be
between 5-6 pages in length (no longer), 12-point font, and double-spaced. Each
essay is worth 15% of the final grade. You will hand in your hard copies of the
essays at the end of class on the day that they are due. Late assignments will lose
at grade point per day (e.g. A  A-).
2) Three Map Quizzes: At the beginning of the Latin America, Africa, and China units,
I will ask you to locate on a map a series of relevant countries, key cities, and/or
major ecological zones. I will provide you with study guides for these quizzes
ahead of time.
3) Occasional Reading Reviews: When necessary, I will ask all of you to respond to a
few, short questions on the reading assignments for a particular session.
4) Final Exam: The final exam is a take-home test, which will consist of short
identification questions, a short essay section, two long essays, and a matching
section.
Assessment of Your Work:
Your final grade will reflect your performance on the short papers (45%), your map
quizzes (10%), your final exam (25%), and your class participation (20%). I will factor
your performance on the occasional reading reviews into your class participation grade.
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Plagiarism: The Amherst College community takes plagiarism very seriously.
Plagiarism is the presentation of the ideas or words of others as if they are your own. It
amounts to a violation of basic ethical principles and a breach of academic standards of
conduct. You must use quotation marks when presenting phrases that you have not written,
and you must cite sources for ideas that are not your own. The Amherst College policy on
plagiarism appears online at:
https://www.amherst.edu/campuslife/deanstudents/acadhonesty/plagiaris m
If you need further clarification, please consult the Amherst College Library website on
citation methods: https://www.amherst.edu/library/research/citation
Course Schedule
Latin America:
Tuesday, September 7
Lecture/discussion Topic: “Course Introduction: The Enclosure of The Commons.”
Assignments for next session:
 Guillermo Castro Herrera, “Environmental History (Made) in Latin America”
(April 19, 2001): http://www.hnet.org/~environ/historiography/latinam.htm
 Myrna Santiago, “Rejecting Progress in Paradise: Huastecs, the Environment,
and the Oil Industry in Veracruz, Mexico, 1900-1935,” Environmental History 3,
no. 2 (1998): 169-88.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3985378
Thursday, September 9
Lecture/discussion Topic: “The Social Ecology of Mexican Oil: An Environmental History
of Vera Cruz, Mexico, 1900-1938.”
Assignments for next session:
 ¡Cochabamba!, pages 1-86.
 Peter B.R. Hazell, “Green Revolution: Curse or Blessing?” International Food Policy
Research Institute (2002): http://www.ifpri.org/pubs/ib/ib11.pdf
Tuesday, September 14
Lecture/discussion Topic: Lecture/Discussion Topic: “The Green Revolution in Mexico: A
Pandora’s Box of Possibilities, 1944-Present”
Assignment for next session:
 Paul S. Sutter, “Nature’s Agents or Agents of Empire?: Entomological Workers
and Environmental Change during the Construction of the Panama Canal,” Isis
98, no. 4 (2007): 724-54. http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/529265
 Look at Google Maps satellite view of the Panama Canal:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Panama+canal&ll=9.277994,79.913006&spn=0.115880,0.204826&t=k&hl=en
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Thursday, September 16
Lecture/discussion Topic: “A Diseased Artery: Mosquitoes, Race, Gender, and the Making
of the Panama Canal, 1904-1914.”
MAP QUIZ #1 – Latin America
Assignment for next session:
 Steve Marquardt, “Pesticides, Parakeets, and Unions in the Costa Rican Banana
Industry, 1938-1962,” Latin American Research Review 37, no. 2 (2002): 3-36.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2692147

Complete ¡Cochabamba!
Tuesday, September 21
Lecture/discussion Topic: “Making a Banana Republic: Monocultures, Monopolies, and
Movements in Guatemala, 1944-1954.”
Assignment for next session:
 Philip M. Fearnside, “Deforestation in Brazilian Amazonia: History, Rates, and
Consequences,” Conservation Biology 19, no. 3 (2005): 680-88.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2005.00697.x/abstract

Alexi Barrionuevo, “To Fortify China, Soybean Harvest Grows in Brazil,” The
New York Times (April 6, 2007)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/business/worldbusiness/06soy.html
Thursday, September 23
Lecture/discussion topic: “Vegetable Steel: The soybean’s unlikely journey from China to
Brazil.”
Assignment for next session:
 Ed Ewing, “Cuba’s Organic Revolution,” The Guardian (April 4, 2008)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/04/organics.food
Tuesday, September 28
Lecture/discussion topic: In-class film – “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived
Peak Oil” (The Community Solution, 2006)
ESSAY #1 DUE AT THE END OF CLASS
Assignment for next session:
 William Beinart, “African History and Environmental History” (June 11, 2001):
http://www.h-net.org/~environ/historiography/africaeh.htm
Sub-Saharan Africa:
Thursday, September 30
Lecture/discussion topic: “Africa is more than the sum of its famines!”
Assignments for next session:
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
Lynne Heasley, “Reflections on Walking Contested Land: Doing Environmental
History in West Africa and the United States,” Environmental History 10 (July
2005): 510-31.
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/eh/10.3/heasley.html


David Quammen (Photographs by George Steinmetz), “Tracing the Human
Footprint,” National Geographic Special Issue on Africa (September 2005):
http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0509/feature1/index.html
Cutting the Vines of the Past, pages 1-68.
Tuesday, October 5
Lecture/discussion topic: “Peanuts: The Groundnut Scheme in Tanganyika, 1946-1951.”
Assignments for next session:
 Dirk Verschuren, et al., “History and timing of human impact on Lake Victoria,
East Africa,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 269 (2002): 289-94.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1690894&blobtype=pdf
Cutting the Vines of the Past, pages 69-118.
Thursday, October 7
Lecture/discussion topic: In-class film: Hubert Sauper, dir., “Darwin’s Nightmare” (Image
Entertainment, 2007)
Assignments for October 20th session:
 Freek J. Venter, et al. “The Evolution of Conservation Management Philosophy:
Science, Environmental Change and Social Adjustments in Kruger National
Park,” Ecosystems 11, no. 2 (2008): 173-92.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/1776r2614w120561/


Edward M. Bruner and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Maasai on the Lawn:
Tourist Realism in East Africa,”Cultural Anthropology 9 (November 1994): 435-70.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/656384
Complete Cutting the Vines of the Past.
Tuesday, October 12
Lecture/discussion topic: Finish watching “Darwin’s Nightmare.” Discussion of Cutting
the Vines of the Past.
Thursday, October 14
– No Class – I will be out of town –
Tuesday, October 19
Lecture/discussion topic: “Frozen in Time, Yet Forced to Change: The Maasai and
Serengeti National Park, 1921-2008.”
MAP QUIZ #2 – Sub-Saharan Africa
Assignment for next session:
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
Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières, “Sleeping Sickness,” (2008):
http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/news/issue.cfm?id=2401
Thursday, October 21
Lecture/discussion topic: “The Strange Career of Sleeping Sickness: From Ecological
Equilibrium to Neglected Disease, 1896-2007.”
Assignment for next session:
 Judith A. Carney, “African Rice in the Columbian Exchange,” The Journal of
African History 42, no. 3 (2001): 377-96.
http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FAFH%2FAFH42_03%2FS0021853701007
940a.pdf&code=91d3968e33a89c70ec9cdaa4de02bcf5
Tuesday, October 26
Lecture/discussion topic: “Rice and Race: Re-examining African Contributions to the
Columbian Exchange.”
Assignment for next session:
 Khadija Sharife, “DRC’s magic dust: Who benefits?” Pambazuka News 468
(February 4, 2010):
http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/61992\

Victoria Brittain, “Colonialism and the Predatory State in the Congo,” New Left
Review 1, no. 236 (July-August 1999)
http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2085
Thursday, October 28
Lecture/discussion topic: “A Ghost in the ‘Lungs’ of the World: From Rubber to Coltan in
the Congo, 1885-2008.”
ESSAY #2 DUE AT THE END OF CLASS
Assignment for next session:
 Micah S. Muscolino, “Global Dimensions of Modern China’s Environmental
History,” World History Connected 6 (2009):
http://worldhistoryconnected.press.illinois.edu/6.1/muscolino.html
China:
Tuesday, November 2
Lecture/discussion topic: “All the World’s a Stage…and China Has the Most Players!”
Assignment for next session:
 Where the Dragon Meets the Angry River, 3-59.
Thursday, November 4: In-class film: “Manufactured Landscapes” (Zeitgeist Films,
2007)
Tuesday, November 9
Lecture/discussion topic: “‘Revolution Is Not a Dinner Party’: A Social and Environmental
History of The Great Leap Forward, 1958-62.”
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Assignment for next session:
 Where the Dragon Meets the Angry River, 60-107.
Thursday, November 11
Lecture/discussion topic: In-class film: “Up the Yangtze” (National Film Board of Canada,
2007) and discussion.
Assignment for next session:
 Complete Where the Dragon Meets the Angry River.
 Susan Greenlaugh, “Science, Modernity, and the Making of China’s One-Child
Policy,” Population and Development Review 29, no. 2 (2003): 163-96.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3115224?cookieSet=1
Tuesday, November 16
Lecture/discussion topic: “A Nation of ‘Little Emperors’: China’s Planned Birth (OneChild) Policy (jìhuà shēngyù), 1979-Present.”
Assignment for next session:
 Kenneth Pomeranz, “Political Economy and Ecology on the Eve of
Industrialization: Europe, China, and the Global Conjuncture,” The American
Historical Review 107, no. 2 (2002): 425-46.
http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/107.2/ah0202000425.html
Thursday, November 18
Lecture/discussion topic: “Life on the Hydrocarbon Frontier: Building the Energy
Foundations for the World’s Most Populous Country.”
MAP QUIZ #3 – China
Assignment for next session:
 Megan Sweeney and Susan McCouch, “The Complex History of the
Domestication of Rice,” Annals of Botany 100, no. 5 (2007): 951-57.
http://aob.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/mcm128v1
Tuesday, November 23 & Thursday, November 25
-- No class…Thanksgiving Recess! –
Tuesday, November 30
Lecture/discussion topic: “The Word for Rice is also the Word for Food: Rice Culture and
Cultivation in Chinese History.”
ESSAY #3 DUE AT THE END OF CLASS
Assignment for next session:
 Peter Dauvergne, “The Problem of Consumption,” Global Environmental Politics
10, no. 2 (2010): 1-10. http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/glep.2010.10.2.1
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The World:
Thursday, December 2
Lecture/discussion topic: In-class film: “Black Gold” (Mongrel Media, 2006)
Assignment for next session:
 How Much Should a Person Consume?, pages 1-124.
 Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Ecology and the Economy: What is Rational?” Paper
delivered at Keynote Session of Conference, “World System History and Global
Environmental change,” Lund, Sweden, 19-22 September 2003:
http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/iwecoratl.htm
Tuesday, December 7
Lecture/discussion topic: “Synoptic Views and Local Knowledge.”
Assignment for next session:
 Complete How Much Should a Person Consume?
Thursday, December 9:
Lecture/discussion topic: “Cultures of Consumption in a Finite World.”
Assignment for next session:
 Watch and Listen – Amy Goodman and Wangari Maathai, “The View from
Nairobi: Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai Reacts to State of the Union
from the World Social Forum in Kenya,” Democracy Now! The War and Peace
Report (January 24, 2007):
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/1/24/the_view_from_nairobi_nobel_peace

Vandana Shiva and J. Bandyopadhyay, “The Evolution, Structure, and Impact of
the Chipko Movement,” Mountain Research and Development 6 (May 1986): 133-42.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3673267.pdf
Tuesday, December 14
Lecture/discussion topic: “Time to Change the Timeline: Environmental Movements in
Other Worlds.”
Friday, December 17: Take-home final exam due at my office (Morgan 112) by 5:00 PM.
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